Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @08:14AM
from the almost-as-good-as-the-NSA's-version dept.

kc123 tips news that 'DeepFace,' the software research project created by Facebook engineers to identify people in pictures, is now accurate 97.25% of the time. In other words, it's almost as good at recognizing faces as humans, who are able to determine whether two photos show the same person 97.53% of the time. The article says DeepFace reaches that level of accuracy "regardless of variations in lighting or whether the person in the picture is directly facing the camera." It continues,
"DeepFace processes images of faces in two steps. First it corrects the angle of a face so that the person in the picture faces forward, using a 3-D model of an 'average' forward-looking face. Then the deep learning comes in as a simulated neural network works out a numerical description of the reoriented face. If DeepFace comes up with similar enough descriptions from two different images, it decides they must show the same face. ... The deep-learning part of DeepFace consists of nine layers of simple simulated neurons, with more than 120 million connections between them. To train that network, Facebook’s researchers tapped a tiny slice of data from their company’s hoard of user images—four million photos of faces belonging to almost 4,000 people."

When are they planning to connect face identification with the street/store surveillance cameras? Then they could know who is where anytime of the day unless you wear big hats, large sunglasses, fake beards etc.

When this happens, think of the convenience! All you'll need to do is look at the nearest camera and give a thumbs up, and Facebook will automatically mark that you Liked [whatever you're standing near].

Two people could become friends by finding the nearest Big Brother station and doing a thumbs up together.

One of (many) problems will be how they contextualize all that data. You know, this started as a joke, but seriously, if Facebook had a feed of this kind of data, it would be interesting to see the hypothetical profile they build based on what they would see an individual near vs. what they claim to like on their public page.

Don't you think the NSA is already doing this? The capability is there, all it takes is the impetus and funding - and the NSA has plenty of both. The NSA has a system with a silly code name that hacks into any cameras it can find, runs facial recognition, and stores the results in a database that's tracking where everyone in the US is. A system that is also tied into the licence plate reading that the police are using along with agreements with cities like Chicago and NY to use their cities camera systems,

Muslims were right and they're right again. In between, they were wrong.

You know, kind of like don't eat pork, or don't eat shellfish. Was true, not any more. Of course, I don't buy just any pork or shellfish, so I guess it's true again. For a while there you could just eat anything that was in the store. Now food commonly ain't actually food, and you have to keep a lookout.

Too bad the Muslims are right now for the wrong reasons. That makes them not actually right, just accidentally correct.

Well, that was actually the jews. You do understand jew, christian, muslim is basically all the same (except the 'church' 'interpreted' jesus words as meaning sinning is fine).

It seems you also don't understand the wearing of the burqa. There is no right or wrong about it, it is to show devotion to god. You know, exactly how nuns cover their hair. It's just that most 'christians' are godless heathens whose religion means nothing to them.

Right. That's pretty fucking major. It's the difference between an orthodox religion and an orthoprax religion. Christianity, of the three, is the only orthodox religion, with belief being sufficient to gain entry to the afterlife.

It seems you also don't understand the wearing of the burqa. There is no right or wrong about it, it is to show devotion to god

Yeah, right. That's what Christians were told about when they should eat fish, but it was just a bunch of bullshit with an economic purpose. So, why did the

What you seem to be getting confused about is the difference between those that choose to wear the burqa because they are muslims and those who get forced to wear it because they belong to a backwards culture who can't control their sexual urges upon sight of a woman. These are two very different things.

Could be. Many have suggested so. I'm not aware of any hard evidence that it's relevant to anything, though. Any effects so far (that I am aware of) can be explained away by the placebo effect.

What you seem to be getting confused about is the difference between those that choose to wear the burqa because they are muslims and those who get forced to wear it because they belong to a backwards culture who can't control their sexual urges upon sight of a woman. These are two very different things.

Wait, you mean those who were brainwashed into wearing a black bag by their muslim parents and neighbors, and those who they attempted to brainwash but failed, and are forced to wear a black bag anyway? These two groups are not as different as you think they are, though there is a major difference.

Actually, there are two things that are wrong with it. First, that people seem to have tendency to force that unto others, or hold them in contempt if they don't follow the example, distorting their relations with burqa-non-wearers (that goes for any kind of clothing culture, of course). Second, in some cultures, face-to-face eye contact - literally - is considered basic politeness (as a schizoid, I don't fully grasp the notion, but there it is), and the introduction of burqas for whatever reason feels over

Those two food items can cause severe illness if eaten uncooked. My guess is a long time ago the Jews saw a connection between certain food items and illness and thus banned them. Its likely Islam then copied those laws as the two religions share a very similar set of rules concerning food.

CVDazzle is an interesting idea, but one would need to change their hair and face style randomly, and fairly frequently, to defeat algorithms that try to match the dazzle style. Razzle-dazzle worked well for military camouflage because it takes advantage of problems with the human brain's pattern matching abilities. However, it does not work as well against neural net algorithms that know that they are looking for objects that are camouflaged this way. Still, this could make for an interesting fashion fad.

sure. it works now because these computer vision algorithms are crude. I, and most people, would have little problem identifying those people. It's only a matter of time before a system is sophisticated enough to recognize that's a dude with some paint on his face and a silly hairstyle.

While I'm not glad about this, I am glad they are publishing how accurate it is. If Facebook is able to accomplish this, it should be serve as another example of the dangers of letting the NSA (or anyone else) record our lives without our consent.

The safety used to be that the NSA had way too much information and too little manpower to ever make use of it against average citizens. When you read stories about what Facebook and Google can do, you realize the NSA doesn't need the manpower to effectively cata

It sounds like the next capital hill scandal. Fortunately for teenaged girls, their faces are always scrunched up and lips pursed, when they turn 25 and take a normal picture Facebook won't be able to recognize them.

Facebook is, among many other things, the top photo sharing service on the web. And face recognition plays a very important role in this aspect. They must invest a lot in this kind of technologies, so it's no surprise skynet will be born from them.

This news was showing in a lot of sites lately, couldn't wait to see what discussions it would spark here! Let me grab my popcorn!

Well I don't know about everyone else but the state already has my picture and address on my drivers license. Add the information on my tax returns and the state really doesn't need to do anything else if they want to find me. Both of these sources of information were available well before the Internet ever existed.

Yeah, but what if the State wanted to know where you were a week from last Tuesday, or wanted to look for leverage over you based on your purchasing habits or travel habits? Now it's a bit less innocent.

Exactly why would the government need leverage over me? That assumes the government wants force me to do something against my will but I cannot think of a single thing that would make this happen. My purchasing and travel habits get logged every time I use a credit or debit card. Just like all my phone calls get logged so the phone company can bill me. My cars are registered with the state and county along with my insurance details. Property that I own is registered in county records for tax assessments and

Which is why there is not a single photo of me online that is linked to my name. So even though I may well be in a few tourist shots they can't find out who the ugly looking guy in the background is.

Yet.

However I suppose its only a matter of time before [select government here] matches up driving licence/passport photos using this tech against any street scene photos it can find on the internet and give a rundown of places you've been and possibly when. If they haven't done so already.

All it takes is to be identified once. Just one friend snapping a picture of you & pals at a wedding,who then posts the picture on FB, and dutifully identifies each person in the photo. After that, every image of you available on the web will be linked to you. That picture of you puking your guts out at some drunken frathouse blowout that you hoped everyone had forgotten about will now be on the first page of a Google search on your name.

It's not quite clear what the 97.25% figure actually means. They trained it on just 4000 faces. What number of faces they tested it on to derive that figure is not stated. It's a lot easier to be accurate within a smaller set than a larger set. Of course other intelligence could be used to prune the list of candidates down for some usage scenarios.

Guess it's good that FB allows you to not have anybody tag you in posts, or to allow you to review it after it's tagged, or even to review it before it get's posted.

FB won't be the problem unless you're an idiot who doesn't even know there are privacy settings. Then again, if they're not paranoid people thinking the government is out to get them they aren't looking for those settings anyways.

People can do this to you even if you don't have Facebook. I am identified in Facebook pictures even though I don't have an account and try to maintain an anonymous online presence. Fortunately I have a relatively common name.

In other words it's time to start publishing your photos through your own account and others with false identification. Use different names. Make sure to reuse them at least often enough to make several options likely - if you use a different one every time, your own name on several photos will be enough to identify you. Use existing names, best ones would be of other people using this technique.

Build a large enough group of real people sharing their names and an even bigger pool of fake identities, automat

97.25% isn't very good, really. Think of the use case of trying to find someone specific in the airport......that means out of every hundred people, you are messing up 3 times. Does that mean human investigators are going to need to check it out?

Secondly, I'm not convinced their statistics take into account false positives (and other potential errors). It happens fairly often than Facebook thinks a tree or something is a person to be tagged.

Or at least I hope so. I've been falsely tagging myself in Facebook, reversing and randomizing the tags, for years. I wish more people would poison the well instead of trying to go "invisible", we just need about 1/3 errors to discredit positive ID as a method.

That's kind of a silly term. Occidental refers to the western world, of which the Americas, and "America", are a part. Neither has much to do with facial structure. There are lots of occidental people who are not caucasians, and lots of Americans who are not caucasian. If you're speaking anthropologically, the original residents of the Americas are very much non-caucasian.

Caucasian refers to people who are presumed, based on appearance, to be related to groups that lived in Europe. It's not a bad term

You know they've actually researched this and asians are no worse at identifying other asians than caucasians are at identifying other caucasians, it's got nothing to do with genes either just who you've grown up with. Obviously if you grew up with 95 out of 100 caucasians and five asians you don't need to record much detail about the asians to figure out who's who, but then when you're suddenly flooded with very many asians your mind can't cope. Over time if you lived there you'd start noticing more and mo

You do realize that if they are ~97% accurate among their entire dataset (Which includes Asia, Europe, North America, and South America) that they can already handle some portion of the 38,929,319 'African American' population, the 14,674,252 'Asian American' population, 2,932,248 'Native American' population, 540,013 'Pacific Islander' population, 19,107,368 'other race' population, or 9,009,073 'two or more races' population just in the US right...?

My strategy has been to use photo manipulation tools to distort photographs of my face (especially important aspects for facial recognition such brow ridge, relative distance between facial features, etc.), then upload them and tag myself. By uploading photos with subtle changes first and then gradually making the changes more drastic, my hope is that it will be enough to make the training data useless without setting off any alarms and having the distorted photos discarded as outliers.

Please notice that this feature can be disabled in you Facebook account options. I'm at work and can't access it right now but I know the option is there, which takes care of both auto tagging (i.e. DeepFace) and manual tagging (i.e. your friends tag you on photos).

And It's not like your Facebook ID was issued when you were born, like your SSN or birth certificate. You willingly signed up for the service, so quit complaining about privacy bullshit, or quit using Facebook.

Facebook won't [at least, publicly] autotag you unless you actually have an account, because otherwise there's no account to associate your face with. They may well do this internally, but that information isn't available to users if so. Of course, someone else can create an account "on your behalf" and then those photos can be associated with that identity, and thus with one another; that's linked to your identity practically but not directly.

Having never had a Facebook account, this still worries me as I know I have been identified in photos posted to others' Facebook accounts. It would be nice if everyone read the terms of service and privacy policy beforehand, but we all know that's never going to happen.

I believe you forget or are a little ignorant of how Facebook works. If one does not sign up for Facebook, their friends who have will probably tag them in a photo. Now Facebook knows you exist and they are tracking that. They know your face as more photos are tagged -- granted it's harder because you are not uploading photos of yourself more often.

The auto tagging is not all of Deep Face. It is only the result of Deep Face. You get to opt not to show what Deep Face has learned. But your face (and everythin

I never signed up to facebook. A number of my friends however did. They 'invited' me to join facebook by giving it my email address to facebook. It got a little insane with the facebook reminders so I 'unsubscribed'. In doing this, I created a hidden profile which is blacklisted.

My friends upload images of me to facebook. Facebook cookies on my computer track me when I visit any page which has the facebook button on it. My email provider Yahoo may well be sharing information about me with facebook (without my knowledge). Eventually facebook will gather all the connecting pieces of information on me to have a face, an email, and a browsing (possible purchasing) history.

Just because you can 'opt out' doesn't mean that they're not doing it anyway in the background. I'm not comfortable knowing that these people know more about me than I remember about myself.

The problem is that person X who has never signed up for Facebook ends up in a picture with someone (Person Y) who did. No one yet knows who Person X is, and Person Y doesn't identify them, and has all the recognition/auto tag features turned off. Good thing too, because Person X looks like they're so drunk they've lost the ability to control their bowels and keep their clothes on properly.

Rinse and repeat.

Remember, facebook still runs the recognition on all photos - they use such information to surface the posts you might be most interested in. If you're in a few photos with Person X (even if unidentified), then Facebook still wants to surface your friends photos with Person X because (quite reasonably) you might be interested in them.

Years late, someone identifies Person X. Now all pictures of Person X can be found by using Person X's name, even though they never signed up for Facebook.

This is a specific case of the general concerns that always come out whenever there's a privacy/facebook story on slashdot. You don't even have to play the game to lose on Facebook.

Not so sure about "years later". I have an Asus laptop that I bought three or so years ago and it has facial recognition login. That was cool at the time and I figured what the hell I paid for it already so I trained it to login using my face. It worked really well.

That was three years ago, I haven't changed the configuration but now it doesn't work any more:(

You are blind to the fact that this is not a matter of going online to facebook. This is the reverse. This is the point where facebook starts coming to you. In real life. In the street, at the airport, in the store, at the dentist. And it'll know you, not necessarily because you've told it, but because all your acquaintances have.

Facebook will pass that information on to the airport/store/hospital because they'll pay to know who you are before you even approach the counter. "So they can better serve you."

While I mean that to be funny, the concept isn't. They will simply tailor their offers to better match your socio-economic expectations. Economics calls this price discrimination and it is about charging you as an individual the maximum they can get away with. And if your rate is to low to appeal to them you are excluded from buying at all.

During any price negotiations, the company wants to best maximise their profit. Any inside info they have on you will be used to their benefit, not yours. It skews negotiations in their favor, because you don't have the same inside knowledge on them.

...and if they want ANY profit whatsoever off me, they'll have to give me deep discounts. What's so hard to comprehend about this, they're already doing it! When you're doing large volumnes the amount of profit is to some extent inconsequential as long as you're getting turnover.

I read the paper and while the approach of learning a representation for faces, and then classifying in that new space whether the face is the same as model is sound, the representation is trained on a closed dataset (the 4m faces from facebook).

So it means that there is no way for the scientific community to check whether the results are correct or not. The results in the paper lack a comparison to a reproducible result, like using the youtube or faces in the wild datasets to train the representation, and

I read the paper and while the approach of learning a representation for faces, and then classifying in that new space whether the face is the same as model is sound, the representation is trained on a closed dataset (the 4m faces from facebook).

So it means that there is no way for the scientific community to check whether the results are correct or not. The results in the paper lack a comparison to a reproducible result, like using the youtube or faces in the wild datasets to train the representation, and then report results given that representation. This way researchers could validate the approach.

I would never have accepted such paper if I were to review it.

I don't believe them anyway. It rarely suggests the right names for the people in the photos that I upload. I only upload pictures of specific groups of people, and they are all somewhat similar pictures. So If its 97.5% accurate then I must account for most of the 2.5% of the inaccuracies.

Keep in mind that their result is on a controlled dataset ("labeled faces in the wild," http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lf... [umass.edu]) for which a lot of training data is available and on which previously proposed systems already perform well.

So this 97% number is a bit of an adventurous extrapolation. Think of it as only polling in NYC and stating that you can predict the result of the next presidential election. The paper was clear on that point, only the summary made it look catchy as usual.

I think it's to hit the 97.53% number they have for humans...basically its PR...internal & external PR

Internally, that DeepFace team has to justify their existence

Externally, f/b uses these headlines to drive their ad revenue

It's all a shell game, from a researchers perspective. It's essentially psuedo-science....it's engineering demonstrating a capability not data proving/disproving a hypothesis that is being actively tested.

4 million photos of 4 thousand people. That is an average of 1000 images of each person. Wow. It's really hard to imagine people have that many photos of themselves on Facebook (okay, the teenagers do take selfies daily, but that would still be 3 years of daily selfies). I also see a lot of occurrences of people being "tagged" in a photo just so that person will be alerted to the existence of the photo - for example, photos of their kids doing something cute. That's gotta fuck with the algorithm a bit.

Thankfully my wife is like this. She will post a photo with none of the faces tagged but tags the post with a dozen people, none of which are the people in the photo. Although this is probably of limited value since the whole point of this is probably to see through this unintentional misdirection and lack of face-tagging to internally "correct" these kinds of posts so they know who the people in the photo really are.

I have tagging in posts and photos disabled by default and the only picture of me I've ev

I logged into Facebook for the first time in about 6 months, and it required me to authenticate myself by answering a series of questions about who was in each picture. It would display 3 pictures, each showing a square around a particular person, and it would ask who the person is. It was multiple choice.

I wonder if this is how they confirm that the data is correct, to eliminate intentional errors. You can ask a person who doesn't own the picture and didn't tag it to confirm the person in there. By masking it as an authorization request you convince people who otherwise would not be involved in tagging to participate.

Recently, FB decided that it needed to verify that I was really me when logging in. To do this, it presented me with a bunch of photos from my "friends" that had been tagged and insisted that I choose a name of someone in the photo. If I got enough of them wrong, it would "lock" my account. (Not quite "lock" but I had to try it again). Not only did it pull up obscure photos from "friends" I rarely interact with so I had little chance of knowing who was in the photo. But get this: It pulled up photos of people facing away from the camera and expected me to know who the person was from behind. Da fuq, FB? Seriously?!?

just drop Facebook already and get account with your frineds on small largely unknown social networking site, there are hundreds of them. Facebookk was a passing fad that more and more people are leaving behind because of its intrusive practices